Folios: a Sneak Peek

As you may have seen, I've been mulling over some ideas about digital photos.

I'm convinced something's missing. And it's not just about longevity, though that's a piece of it.

One of the questions I'm turning over in my head is this: What is the right unit of sharing? And how do we make artifacts worth sharing, including context, stories, commentary, and our own aesthetic choices?

We've gotten used to the post, with one or more photos. And then we have whole collections, maybe in something like iPhoto or Google Photos or Dropbox. And maybe we make (and share) albums for things like vacations. But somehow those feel like the wrong size and shape to me.

Thinking about posterity got me thinking again about print. Obviously, there are lots of companies that print photo books of various sizes, but it's quite of a lot of work to put one together. It's great for major events and significant projects, but hard to justify for more everyday cases.

What if we could get some of the nice qualities of print, but made it really easy to make well-designed page layout, and had lightweight digital viewing and sharing tools, too?

What if you could share your photos and stories with a link? Like more of a photo zine than a post or an album. I'm calling these folios, at least for now.

And sure, if you want to have it printed, you could do that, too.

Here's a prototype of an interface that borrows from the design language of presentation editors. It can be this easy!

I haven't built it all out yet, but imagine being able to add captions or full pages of text, reorder images, choose multi-image page layouts or full bleed, and select different themes.

At then at the end you can share a link or download a pdf, which can be printed or shared directly.

Being able to automatically lay out pages based on a bunch of files is actually pretty neat. I've got another script where I can generate a pdf contact sheet for a whole folder full of images. (I now have a 29-page pdf of every photo I uploaded to Instagram across the ten years I used it: 2011-2021.)

Here's an example from a recent trip to Idaho:

I imagine having full collections of images that can also be published and shared. Those could be large albums, like all the good photos from a vacation, or more of an archive, like all of your Instagram photos, or even an archive of family photos and letters.

These collection are more analogous to boxes of photos than albums. It's useful to know what's in them, and they're great to have as historical material. If you're going to share a story or narrative, though, you probably want to pull out some subset and include your commentary. So you could make folios that pull from collections, maybe even from collections that somebody else has curated and shared with you.

While I'm imaging having a web interface for authoring and sharing both collections and folios, I have other thoughts about how to export, store, and share these as single files, which helps address some of the questions of backups and portability. I'll leave that for a different post, but here's a hint: it involves parquet files and DuckDB.

Does any of this resonate for you? Do any examples of sharing or curating from your own life fit this model well?